By COLIN MCDONALD, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, June 21, 2007

Seattle will not build a third garbage transfer station in Georgetown and instead will work to reduce the amount of waste the city produces, Mayor Greg Nickels and City Councilman Richard Conlin said Thursday morning.

"The problem with garbage is there is just too much of it," Nickels said.

The mayor said the city would update and expand its existing facilities in South Park and Wallingford to focus on recycling.

"This is the time for a fairly dramatic paradigm change," Conlin said. "No more tonnage of garbage is going to leave Seattle."

Every day Seattle sends a milelong train filled with garbage to eastern Oregon -- more than 440,000 tons were sent south in 2006, but the councilman and mayor said that would change with a new resolution, called the Zero Waste Strategy. The plan, first introduced in early June, outlines goals for the city to recycle 60 percent of waste by 2012, cap the tonnage of garbage at 2006 levels and work to reduce the total amount of waste 1 percent each year for the next five years.

The first significant changes would be implementing a new organics program that would require all single-family households to sort food waste, and a new permitting system designed to encourage contractors with tax breaks and grants to recycle building materials. Both programs would begin in 2008.

Although historically those living in multifamily units have showed the greatest support for a citywide food scrap-recycling program, it would only be available to single-family units, according to results of a 2006 city survey.

The resolution will be voted on July 10 in a City Council committee before it goes to the full council for a vote.

"This effort is going to make a huge impact," said Heather Trim of People for Puget Sound, a non-profit group working to protect the health of Puget Sound and the Northwest straits. "We are going to have to really change the way people look at waste."

Trim helped lead the push to persuade city leaders to ban the use of plastic foam, citing not only the amount of space it uses but the impact it has on the Sound, where it ends up as litter. Under the new resolution, the city would study the impact of a plastic foam ban.

Conlin said he wants the city to view waste as a resource -- not just something to be thrown away. Ideally, all products would simply have endless cycles: Food scraps and pizza boxes would become dirt and fertilizer; tires would become filler; and products could be designed so they could be easily reused or broken down to recyclable parts.

After outcries from Georgtown residents, Conlin compiled their ideas, developed the new strategy to deal with garbage in Seattle and called for a study.

Georgetown is a growing enclave for artists and musicians. But in recent years, residents have felt under siege -- by a proposed commercial airport at Boeing Field, sex offender housing, and talk of requiring future strip clubs to locate nearby.

The city spent four years looking at more than 1,000 sites before picking the Georgetown location, causing many residents there to wonder why it fell on their small neighborhood to solve the city's garbage problem.

On Thursday, the mayor commended Georgetown residents for not just fighting to keep the new transfer site out of their neighborhood but encouraging city leaders to eliminate the need for it altogether.

"Seattle has given itself the right to call itself the Emerald City again," said Joel Ancowitz, 41, who spent the past year working against having a transfer station in Georgetown and getting the city to reduce waste.

"It's about sacrificing for the planet and if that means a couple extra minutes each day to sort garbage, that is something I am happy to do."

City spokesman Andy Ryan said Thursday the city has not started redesigning the transfer sites since the decision to not build a new one is less than a month old. Although the initial study in the Zero Waste Strategy would cost $1 more per household per month, there is no overall cost estimation of the plan yet.

Both existing transfer facilities were designed in the 1950s and built in the 1960s. The mayor said they are unsafe and can no longer meet demands.

Earlier this week, a haz-mat unit closed down the South Park station because of gas wafting up from one of the dump sites and making it hard to breathe. The gas was never identified, said Ryan.